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Successful leaders these days never stop learning. Completing their formal education (whether that’s high school, trade school, college, grad school, or whatever) is just the beginning for them. That’s because continuous learning is essential today. Your knowledge can quickly become outdated because of the speed at which AI, other technologies, work, culture, geopolitical conditions, etc. keep transforming.

Once you commit to continuous learning, you have almost unlimited choices of what and how to learn. That in itself can be overwhelming unless you set some criteria for yourself. Your time is valuable and limited, so you need to focus on what’s relevant.

For example, late last year Barrett Values Centre (BVC) alerted me about its May Transforming Organizations program near Amsterdam. That allowed me to be opportunistic as well as “ruthlessly relevant” (to borrow a guideline BVC uses for its client report writing.)

Although the Chateauform–Landhuis Marienheuvel conference venue was more than 4,200 miles from my home in Charleston, SC (where I took the above photo), I decided to participate. The program and its location were:

• Immediately relevant to my current consulting work with BVC as well as potentially significant for future client projects, especially using BVC tools for leadership development and whole system transformation.
• A great fit for my personal travel. My husband and I could easily design a vacation to meet up with our Swiss-based friends in the south of France for several days in mid-May and then travel by train to Amsterdam for a few days together before I started the program and he flew home.

The Transforming Organizations program uses BVC’s Cultural Transformation Tools® to identify challenges, opportunities, and solutions for integrating culture, strategy and leadership in organizations. These key human-centered tools include the Barrett Model®, BVC analytics, and whole system transformation frameworks.

As background, since my 2024 certification in the BVC culture assessment tool, I’ve primarily been supporting one client, Springline Advisory, with that tool. This extremely interesting and useful work involves assessing culture fit as Springline continues to become a larger “big, small firm” with its “Scale + Soul®” culture. Using BVC culture assessments, we identify the distinctive cultures of the small target firms. This cultural discovery process enables a smooth post-acquisition integration for both the small firms and Springline. The small firms help Springline scale while continuing to lean into their own culture, relationships and local connections, which add to Springline’s soul.

Now that I’ve completed BVC’s Transforming Organization program (both the advance self-study and the 3.5 day in-person training), I’m certified to use more of BVC’s models and tools. This includes the BVC 360 leadership development assessments for individuals and teams.

As for the BVC Transforming Organizations experience, it exceeded my expectations programmatically and experientially, especially related to my learning partners. There were just 12 of us along with the three BVC instructors. We were an experienced group from seven countries: Canada, England, Brussels, Germany, Hungary, Serbia, and the United States. (I was the lone American.)

Programmatically, BVC demonstrated how it’s becoming even more of a learning organization. Responding to the external environment as well as client requests, BVC is broadening its role and focus as follows:

• Moving beyond researching and educating to also advising, coaching and facilitating, and being explicit about its roles.
• Expanding beyond culture and values to explore the important responsibilities leaders have in integrating strategy and culture, including values.
• Related to this expansion, increasing the emphasis on whole systems thinking especially because BVC’s point of view is that organizations are human systems and therefore require a whole system approach.
• Introducing new tools, like wireframes, for creating stronger, clearer stories for clients to understand the “so what” and “now what” of their data.
• Committing to “triple loop learning,” a cognitive framework that explores not just how we act and solve problems, but also why and how we learn. The framework encourages asking questions about identity, values, and the systems that govern our behavior, rather than simply fixing errors or challenging existing rules. The model, which is built on the work of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, features:
  • Doing things right (single loop). The learning is about improving existing practices, fixing immediate errors, and following rules.
  • Doing the right things (double loop). The learning switches to questioning the rules, underlying assumptions, and mental models you used.
  • Learning how to learn (triple loop). For the third loop, you explore your core values, identity, purpose, and the overall context in which you make decisions. You then ask how you know what’s right.

As for being “ruthlessly relevant,” this BVC move is more about narrowing in, rather than broadening. Ruthlessly relevant is valuable guidance for writing client reports as well as capturing people’s very short and fractured attention spans.

Also from my perspective, being ruthlessly relevant also involves having a laser focus on exactly what matters, while mercilessly eliminating any fluff, filler, or distraction.

My closing ruthlessly relevant plea: Please practice continuous learning.